


Grave Wax

by CatieBrie



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, Ghost Sherlock, Heavy Angst, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Prompt Fill, Sherlock solves his own murder, Supernatural Elements, THERE IS A HOPEFUL ENDING THOUGH I SWEAR, ish, largely ignores seasons three and four, slight body horror aspects, this is my version of a happy ending/fix-it fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-21 21:31:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9567644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatieBrie/pseuds/CatieBrie
Summary: John, John, John.  John is here. John is safe. John is going to take away all the pain.Then the world goes black and Sherlock dies.--Or, Sherlock solves his own murder.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Holly (HHarris)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HHarris/gifts).



> Holly, I really hope this is what you were looking for when you prompted Sherlock solving his own murder, because this definitely took on a life of its own--I think you can also tell what was written before and after my having seen S4. Also, also! SURPRISE! Bet you thought I forgot about this with how fucking long I took to write it -sobs-
> 
> A warm thank you to iamjohnlocked4life for beta reading this!

“Sherlock, hang in there, help is on the way.”

Through a feverish haze, Sherlock thinks the speaker is worried. The voice catches sharply on a high-pitched attempt at calm, but if the words are in English or Czech or Russian or some other language entirely, he can’t tell. It’s familiar ― a vague sort of familiar that he thinks should be sharper―but then he’s vomiting and pain becomes his entire reality.

Well, he thinks it’s pain―the tightness of his skin and the way it crawls and screams hot before frosting over certainly registers as nothing less than intense.  He sees constellations around his legs and two figures are bent over him but their faces are taffy-melted and brightly colored like exploding stars and his head is throbbing at such a quickened pace he’s not sure it’s throbbing at all.

Dying, he must be dying.

Good.  He deserves to die.  He failed.

He is lifted up, the ground disappearing from his back, dissipating as a solid source of reality. He finds himself floating now, truly wrapped up in galaxies and black space and released from gravity’s tight grip.

“Christ, he’s so light,” the voice says, angry enough to almost hide a deep vein of sadness sliding beneath the syllables.  “How could you leave him like this?”

“I did not know he had been shot.  He said nothing in his last report.” Sherlock registers this as a new voice, sounding just as vague-but-should-be-sharper familiar as the other one.

“He’s your brother, you should have watched him better!”

“John…”   


“Don’t  _ John  _ me!  If he pulls through this I’m killing you both―if he doesn’t, it’s all on you.

John, John, John.  John is here. John is safe. John is going to take away all the pain.

Then the world goes black and Sherlock dies.

―

His heart doesn’t beat. He lifts a hand to his chest and cold fingertips run across a stiff, curved line of flesh and stitches.  Anxiety tries to crawl through his skin, but nothing reacts the way he needs it to and long, sliding moments stretch out around him. He sees nothing, his eyes responding as unwillingly as his heart.

There’s steel and ice against his back, stretched above him like a cave or a plane or a tomb. Encased.  A twinge of panic flares and then dies with no heartbeat to antagonize.

“Let me see him!”

“John, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”   


“I don’t care, let me fucking through or I swear I’ll―”

“It’s alright, Greg, let him in.”

“Molly, I don’t think―” The sound of a heavy door drawing open muffles the rest of Lestrade’s protest.  Sherlock slides forward but his world remains pitch.  He thinks he’s been pulled into empty air, the cold no longers bites the same.

“Christ.”

A hand presses to where Sherlock thought his own should be; fingers spasm into a fist but no warmth travels from it to him. He hears nothing for a long, drawn out moment of disappearing seconds and then.

“It can’t be him, I barely got him back.”

_ But I’m here. _

“John.” Lestrade speaks quietly as if afraid his breath alone could blow John over and shatter him.

And maybe it can, because John’s voice cracks, brittle along every edge. “It can’t be.”

Sherlock drowns beneath the weight of that single break in strength and hears no more.

―

He wakes, gasping air into lungs that don’t inflate and a chest that won’t rise.  

“There you are.” Molly sits next to Sherlock, resting her back against the cold surface of Sherlock’s gravestone.  Sherlock can’t look up from his hands, dirt deep beneath his nails and dried blood flaking from the cracks, as if he’d dug himself free from the earth.  He must have, he’s filthy.  Molly’s shoulder lines flush to his but he feels nothing. “I knew you’d show up eventually.”

“What?” A nail is completely missing from the pinky of his right hand.  It should hurt. It doesn’t. There are places on him that feel stripped of skin and slick with wax, saponification settled prematurely in his fat.  

“You have unfinished business,” she says as if that explains everything when it really explains nothing.  

“Where’s John?” As he says the name he remembers suddenly the cold and the steel and his broken best friend; he remembers his hands that wouldn’t move unlike they do now, his eyes that wouldn’t open.  Death must have taken him, he sees no reason to wake up here with all the tells of a long wasted corpse.

Sherlock looks up from his hands when Molly doesn’t answer and he’s surprised to find tears in her eyes; her voice holds no waver, no hitching-breathy pauses to indicate the wet dripping from her chin and yet― “I’m really dead, aren’t I?”

“I’m so sorry,” she says and she sniffles and cuffs her swollen eyes. Sherlock raises a clumsy hand to comfort her and recoils when it passes through her shoulder. She offers him a pained, watery smile that he doesn't return. “You are.”

“How? Why can you see me? If I'm a ghost, why do I look like this?”

“It’s how you think you should look,” Molly says, answering the question Sherlock cares the least about.  “You’ve estimated how long you’ve been in the ground, the circumstances and conditions of your burial.  It’s funny, though, you were cremated.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t think about that too hard, I’d rather you not start developing burns as well.” She smiles again.  The sun has disappeared from the sky completely, stripping color from the world around them.  His skin glows slightly in the new darkness, a pale lambic white that flickers and flares against Molly’s clothes. “As for how, we don’t know.  It’s been months and we don’t know who or why, and very little about the how.  Officially, you died internationally so the Met doesn’t have jurisdiction.”

“Unofficially?”

“Mycroft kindly handed over what he could after John had a little chat with him.”

_ John.  _ It’s as if his name rings a bell in Sherlock’s empty chest, clanging about until he can think of nothing else. He blinks, centers himself, and asks his next question.

“Can everyone see me?”

“Oh no, I haven’t met anyone else like me,” Molly says, and there’s a loneliness so deep beneath the words Sherlock nearly misses it.  “But I’ve always been closer to the dead than the living.”

“You have always been fond of me,” Sherlock says, resisting the urge to rub his palms down his waxy thighs. The material of his pants has rotted away in places: dead several months then. He estimates it’s October and finds that a macabre and over-wrung cliché. He asks anyway. “What month is it?”

“October. But you knew that.” She shifts, trying not to show her discomfort against the cold of his headstone. “You're smart and I'm sure something about the color of the trees tipped you off.”

“Something like that,” Sherlock says, unfolding himself from his seated position.  “I want to see John, I need to talk to him.”

“Sherlock, he can’t hear you.” Molly struggles to her feet at a slower pace, wobbling as paresthesia hobbles her legs.  

“He can hear you.”

“And do you really think that’s fair?  Thrusting that at him?  Sherlock, he’s lost you before and that nearly broke him and this time I think it actually did.  If he thinks for a second you can come back or if he has to lose you again...it will destroy him.”

“I have something I need to tell him.”

Molly regards him with bright, perceptive eyes.  “Sherlock, the regrets of the dead are not for the living. They have enough of their own.”

―

Sherlock loses sight of the world with the rising sun, and until dusk settles back in, it remains lost.

Molly stayed with him the night before, but Sherlock thinks that was as much to keep him from roaming to Baker Street as it was to keep him company.

That’s where he goes now, yearning for his old home on a level that breaks something inside of him.  Molly says he has unfinished business, that he needs to find out what keeps him tethered to the land of the living when he should have passed on. He thinks it’s his murder, that the pockmarked and oozing bullet wound in his abdomen shocked him into staying. Molly agrees.

But it doesn’t matter over the tug that drags him into the halls of Baker Street.  He wants to see his chair and his skull and his violin. He wants to check on Mrs. Hudson, on his collection of dust. He wants to see John.

John isn’t there, and the flat is all packed up like no one has lived there in ages. Sherlock can’t run his fingers through the dust to determine how long, but he estimates at least a year, maybe two.  It doesn’t matter because everything is empty.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t…

Sherlock doesn’t move until the morning light sweeps him away.

―

Dusk brings him back to his grave, brittle and peeling around the edges. He takes in one long, useless breath and then he screams, releasing a harsh, tearing sound that would have ripped his throat if he had any throat to rip but instead it flutters away, dissipating into a nothingness no one can hear. He falls to the ground and curls into his knees, sobbing at the emptiness that forms him into such a wretched shadow of himself.

He indulges in a moment of self-pity, wringing it out of his waxy flesh until nothing remains but a determination to do  _ something. _

_ You have unfinished business. _

He certainly does. And what could possibly be a more interesting case than his own murder?

Carefully uncurling himself from the ball he’s collapsed into, Sherlock leans back against his headstone, steepling his fingers beneath his chin to think. But there isn’t much to think on, to remember even as a vague, trembling urgency scrapes at the back of his mind, unable to be pinned down. So instead he peels the ruins of his button up away from his perpetually oozing wound and observes. Pus mixes with the blood, a muddy wax-drip mess that almost hides the lines of angry red trailing away from it, mapping out the bad blood that eventually killed him. Septicemia as imagined by Dali.  It does nothing to jolt a useful memory, instead stirring to life vague impressions of shadows and failure and longing that swirl and twist together like smoke. 

Sherlock growls, tugging his shirt closed over his chest, positive he won’t find anything there. His own blasted imagination has destroyed what evidence his corpse could have provided him and the real thing now shifts and settles as ash in an urn, useless.

He needs his case notes.

―

Music plays near silently from a radio tucked away on one of the many shelves, a soft, crackle-lull melody that Sherlock can’t place. The thing is old, unfortunately so, but Molly is fond of old things. 

“You were shot,” Molly says needlessly, filling in that crackle silence as Sherlock reads. “It would have been a kill shot but the bullet missed your heart by very little. I’d say that’s lucky, but…”

“I’m dead anyways,” Sherlock finishes for her, scanning what scant notes she’s collected; he makes impatient noises every time he needs a page turned, hovering over Molly’s shoulder. There isn’t much to what Mycroft provided―what little he did seems more like a bone for the mourning to worry on until the ache has passed.

“Yes.”  

There is  _ some  _ information of substance. Sherlock imagines that John raised bloody hell in the Diogenes Club, a shining, angry knight determined to lay waste to whatever stood in his way, and Mycroft had caved beneath that brilliance and his guilt.  Sherlock was shot in Serbia. 

_ If he pulls through this, I’m killing you both―if he doesn’t, it’s all on you.   _

“Turn the page.”

Serbia had been the last stop, the last thread for Sherlock to unwind and burn in Moriarty’s web. Sherlock had slid so deeply off the radar that even Mycroft had trouble unearthing him in the end; less a rescue mission and more a body-retrieval-with-the-corpse-still-breathing mission. And Mycroft must’ve called John because John was there in the end: why would he do that, why would he call John? John, who already thought Sherlock dead, forced to believe that Sherlock really had fulfilled his wish, his do-this-one-thing-for-me plea that had kept Sherlock’s head above water for so long when all he wanted to do was drown.

And then he died, taken out by a bullet and bad blood and resurrected as a wax Frankenstein’s monster, invisible to the living.

“Sherlock?”

“This is pointless.” Sherlock barely slips the words off his tongue, frustration choking his speech.

“What?”

“POINTLESS!” he roars in a sudden explosion of movement. Pages of reports and scribbled notes go flying, ripped from Molly’s hands to tear around the metal-and-ice space of the morgue. And then, just as suddenly, everything stops; the only movement the fluttering of settling papers as Sherlock and Molly stare at each other.   

“Oh, no.”  

“Oh no?” Sherlock repeats, alarmed, but the world starts to fade, spinning slightly around the edges and then―

nothing.

―

At least a week has passed. Sherlock can tell by the way the trees around his grave have shifted color.  Whatever happened in the morgue exhausted him, it’s the only explanation that makes any sense.  As a ghost, he probably only has so much energy he can exert before he loses shape, disappearing into the ether for however long it takes to thread himself back together again. Energy outbursts must be linked to emotional outbursts, a deduction Sherlock will be wary of until new evidence proves him wrong.  

“Jesus, did the temperature just drop like five degrees, or am I going insane?” 

Sherlock’s head snaps up. He’s no long at the cemetery, but back at the morgue, standing just a foot from DI Lestrade.  Molly, sat at her computer, stares at Sherlock, wide-eyed, as Lestrade wraps his arms around his waist in an effort to warm himself.  “I mean, it was cold before, but this is ridiculous.”

“It’s just you,” Molly squeaks, not looking away from Sherlock. 

“So, insane then,” Lestrade grumbles, starting to pace. “Not that I would mind that, per se. Might be nice not having to deal with, well, you know,  _ everything _ .”

“Ask him about John,” Sherlock mouths, not sure why he keeps silent when he knows Lestrade can’t hear him.  Molly shakes her head minutely.  “ _ Please _ .”

Molly shakes her head again and turns her attention back to Lestrade.  Papers litter one of the examination tables and Sherlock recognizes the notes from before as Lestrade starts shuffling through them, motions jerky and directionless.

“Take a break, Greg.”

“And do what? Fish?” He laughs sourly.  “I don’t think a break is what I need.  I’ve got no one to go home to half the time now that Mary’s back. I’m not keen on the alone time.”

Molly grimaces, eyes sliding back to Sherlock in such a way that he knows he should pay attention. “When did she get back?”

“Last week, maybe? I dunno, she disappeared at a hell of a time.  John wanted to propose before this whole mess, but I don’t know if that’s such a good―”

John wants to propose to someone, John wants to marry someone, John  _ has _ someone.  Sherlock’s ears ring with the unfairness of it all―he won’t be there to see, he won’t be there to help John plan, to help him dance, to spin him around 221B and laugh at his every misstep. He’s not there to make sure this woman―Mary―is even worthy of John.  He can’t trust Lestrade to do it; maybe he can follow Molly to a meeting with Mary…

“Sherlock.”

Sherlock starts, startled to realize that Lestrade is no longer in the room with them. Sherlock has never had such little control over his mind, but now every little mention of John throws him off course, destroys any path his brain might travel down in his attempt to solve his own  _ bloody murder _ . John’s name  _ clangs  _ and  _ clangs  _ and _ clangs  _ until nothing exists but that one syllable swirling around on repeat and Sherlock wants to cave beneath it. He can’t.

“When did Lestrade leave?”

“Five minutes ago,” Molly says.  “He’ll be back soon, I asked him to grab us coffee.” And then, “You should be careful.”

“Careful of what?” Sherlock snaps, angry again. Papers shift and twitch in response, the lights flickering. It all lends credence to his theory that emotional turmoil results in energy output; he needs to gain control.

“Of obsessing.”  She fiddles with the sleeve of her jumper without looking at him and Sherlock’s shredding temper falls to pieces at his feet.

“ _ Obsessing? _ What could possibly happen?  I’m  _ dead _ , a ghost―which, by the way, I didn’t even believe existed until―” He pauses, pretending to count for dramatic effect.  The twitching of the papers has shifted in urgency, the lights flickering with violent regularity. White noise pulses around the shape of his voice, a skin-fine echo.  “―Seventeen days ago.  Is there some manual for avenging spirits I should have read up on: 101 for the Recently Murdered? Number one, don’t bloody obsess!”

“What. in. the. bloody.  _ hell _ ?” 

Sherlock whips towards Lestrade’s voice, sending everything lighter than a sheaf of paper soaring. Molly shrieks Sherlock’s name and the world starts spinning again like it will take him with it and that’s just not on, he has things to  _ do _ .  Noise, so much noise, screams into the air as the lights flare bright and the old radio bursts into life. 

_ I have things to _ DO _! _

And just like that the room settles again with Sherlock still in it.  He stares at his hands, utterly perplexed and ignorant of the living.  He bends to where a few sheets of paper still shuffle across the ground and he touches them. One stops, pinned by his finger. A jolt of excitement, of unfounded dread floods through him.  _ Interesting. _

“I need to, um, sit down I think,” Lestrade says when the silence tries to crystalize into something permanent. He drops to the floor as if his knees have been struck out from beneath him, barely managing to keep hold of the coffees in his hands. He is staring at the radio. “I think your morgue is haunted, Molly.  Want your coffee?”

“You can see him?”  But she also stares at the radio, eyes just as wide and round as Lestrade’s. Sherlock tries to move the paper pinned beneath his finger but it stays stubbornly still.

“No.” Lestrade shakes his head, but Sherlock doesn’t think it’s a denial of the question so much as a denial of everything. “But I heard him. I heard Sherlock.”

Molly doesn’t respond. Sherlock shoves hard at the paper and finally convinces it to slide across the floor.  Lestrade flinches, terrified. 

“Is this a joke? Because if it is, it’s cruel.”

Molly shakes her head. 

“No magnets and clever wiring? No recording?“

“Why would I do that?”

“You helped him die before.”

It's Molly’s turn to flinch, visibly shrinking in on herself against the barb in Lestrade’s tone. Sherlock’s had enough.

“This is a waste of time,” Sherlock barks, his voice popping from the speakers and all eyes turn back to him. Well, Lestrade focuses harder on the radio, but it will have to do. “Molly will have to fill you in later, I don't have the patience to deal with whatever crisis the sudden existence of the supernatural will no doubt stir up in you―”

“I've always believed in spirits, “ Lestrade mutters and Sherlock snorts, unsurprised. 

“Of course you did―”

“Oi, don't judge me, I was right wasn’t I?”

“That's beside the point, Graham.” 

Lestrade blinks and his eyes shine, suddenly glassy as the doubt darkening their edges floods away. “You just can’t stay dead, can you?”

“I  _ am _ dead. Besides, someone has to do your job for you.”

A choked laugh. Lestrade forces himself to stand up and Sherlock does the same, noticing the papers around him shifting ever so slightly as if he’s developed mass enough to displace the air. 

“I need your help.”

“I thought you were doing my job for me?” 

“A little assistance wouldn’t go amiss.”

“Okay. Right―yeah, I can do that,” Lestrade says, nodding as he places his coffees on the ground so that he can push himself all the way up; he grabs them before completely unfolding in a wobbly line.  “Here, Molly.”

“Thanks,” she says, a little shaken.  She holds the coffee close to her chest, hands firmly wrapped around the thin paper cups to steal the warmth.  “I...where should we start, Sherlock?  We’ve looked through these notes before, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do so again?”

Without a better idea, Sherlock concedes.  They spend the rest of the evening reading notes, Sherlock growing steadily frustrated by a lack of evidence.  He doesn’t complain this time, and while he won’t admit it out loud, the company proves to be a balm against the emptiness swirling around inside him.

The sunlight still carries him away.

―

Relief. 

Sherlock feels relief to realize that not more than a day has passed. He worried that with the energy expended in the morgue he would wake up with another week lost to him and that would be unacceptable. Something cold and unforgiving waits in the air around him, a clock ticking toward some future he does not understand, he cannot anticipate; he needs to stay ahead.

All thoughts leave him, analytical mind shut down so suddenly it’s as if the world freezes.

Because he’s not alone.

He’s not…

“ _ John _ .”

John looks terrible, a broken man barely standing on his shaken foundations.

John stops, head jerking towards the sound of his name and for a split second Sherlock thinks maybe John can see him. But then John laughs, harsh and mirthless.

“You wish, Watson.”  He walks away and Sherlock tries to follow, screaming John’s name but it’s pointless, it’s hopeless and that rage and sorrow and helplessness that bubbles so close to the surface floods out as Sherlock wails.

Behind him, unnoticed, his headstone cracks.

―

“I need to see John,” Sherlock says for what must be the hundredth time.  Molly shakes her head, motion weary and grief-heavy and well-practiced.  He sees the toll his existence demands from her, a constant reminder that one day he will disappear again and she can do nothing but help him do it.

His passing will not be his own; it will happen, again, to the few he calls friends.

“I can’t concentrate,” he says, pushing at notes.  They flutter with little effort―for some reason this terrifies him.  It terrifies Molly too, but she has no words to say on the matter.  “I need to see John.”

“You can’t.”

“I did.”

Her head snaps up and she swivels bright eyes on him; there are bags underneath each, bruises spreading out, darkening with each hour she doesn’t sleep. A similar transformation spreads wax and rot along exposed parts of his flesh, a logic-resistant change that spins from his imagination alone.  “You what?”

“I saw him,” Sherlock repeats.  “I saw him at my grave, he heard me.  I need to talk to him.”

“You  _ can’t, _ ” she wails and her eyes flood over with tears that strike through him like ice. He stares, at a loss, but it prompts her to continue, nearly choking on her words. “You’ll get stuck here, you can’t get stuck here.  It’s not right, it’s not right, it’s not―” but her sobbing has claimed the rest of her protests as she lets her head fall into her hands.  The paper below soaks up her grief, swelling and puckering with each new drop.

Stuck.  That gives weight to the terror that tries to restart his heart each time he moves something, each time that effort becomes easier.  Stuck, stuck like this, stuck watching, stuck rotting, stuck― “I could watch over John.”

She laughs, high and hysterical.  “And then he’ll die and who will you watch then?”

“His children.”

“You’ll lose yourself.”  She sniffles and swipes roughly at her eyes, but there is a determination there now.  “You’ll forget who you are, you’ll forget why you stayed and you will never, ever be allowed to move on.”  

“What do I have to move on to?”  He honestly wants to know, because there is no light at the end of the tunnel for him, none that he can see.  “There is nothing without John.”

“You just have to wait, right?  One day John will join you.”  

Sherlock takes a moment to mull that over.  If he’s a ghost, then maybe there’s something after, and that something after has the potential to reunite him with John. Relief at that realization falters as it’s followed quickly by self-hatred.  John’s death should  _ never _ be a happy thing.

But Sherlock stops asking Molly and hopes he will forget.

―

They don’t solve the case so much as the case abruptly splits open around them.

Sherlock flips through case notes, more a habit now than for any real need to study the contents.  Nothing has changed―without a physical form, Sherlock can’t take advantage of his usual contacts or act his way through stealing what resources he may not have ready access to.  Yet Lestrade still comes around, coffee in hand and hidden affection in his eyes that Molly never seems to see as she tries to hold herself together.  What a team.

For this reason, the three of them are together when the door opens as the evening approaches eleven.

“John!”  Molly stands and places herself between Sherlock and the door before Sherlock can even react. “What are you doing here?”

“Ah, hello to you too, Molly,” he says, a little shocked around the eyes at her abruptness. Those eyes that are tired, bruised and flat with the effort to suppress a world of emotion storming underneath, are all that Sherlock wants to look at.  “I came to help―it’s been awhile, I know, but maybe―”

“No!”

“Molly!”  Lestrade snaps, but Sherlock isn’t paying attention.  He’s too engrossed in watching every inch of John’s face as it moves between emotions: always liquid and so easily readable, it’s now melted into something stricken that hurts like phantom fingers digging into Sherlock’s chest.  Sherlock stands, desperate to move closer to John.  As he glides through the table, papers flutter and jerk as the air displaces and the lights flicker gently. John eyes snap to the movement, and for a moment it’s as if he sees Sherlock, looks directly at him and it  _ burns _ .

“What the fuck?”

Molly groans low in her throat, hands reaching out as if to catch Sherlock as he passes through her, but they close on air. Sherlock pays her no attention, too caught up in the orbit that is John Watson. Living, breathing John Watson.

“John,” Sherlock says and the radio that Lestrade has kept on since that first day of contact crackles around the name. John gasps and his gaze shifts from the place Molly’s hands grasped through over to the radio.  Sherlock follows his eyes, placing himself back into their path, willing John to see him.  “John, I’m here.”

“Is…is this a joke?”  John almost chokes on the words.  Everyone is watching John, but Sherlock wants John to watch him back.

“I thought so too,”  Lestrade says as Sherlock says, “It’s not.” 

“I don’t believe you,” John says but his left hand is shaking, a fine tremor no one but Sherlock would even notice.  Sherlock can’t look at anything else.  

“John, is that you?”  A muffled, female voice cuts through the tension and somewhere in the back of Sherlock’s head familiarity flickers to life. It’s uncomfortable, an itch that exists like a memory beneath the skin.  The heavy doors leading to Molly’s morgue open a beat later, letting in a short woman with blond hair and observant blue eyes.  “What’s this?”

John doesn’t, or can’t, answer. His tongue swipes across his bottom lip, a nervous gesture as his hands, now clenched into fists, shake at his thighs.  Sherlock could watch him forever, but the woman tugs at his attention. Sherlock recognizes her―he has to―nothing would cause him to itch like this so badly.  He squints at her: bottle-blond, linguistically skilled, a baker, a nurse, a  _ liar _ . Her stance indicates closeness to John, familiarity―Mary.

“That’s a bit spooky, isn’t it?”  Mary says, looking up as the florescent lights as they sputter black-bright-black.  

Molly inhales, sucking in strength enough to speak again, “I think you both should leave.”

“No,” Sherlock says, his voice popping.  “No, I know her, hold on.”

John jolts, physically jumps in place as his clenched hands splay out in surprise.  Lestrade shifts his own attention on Mary, curious, as Molly cringes.  Mary, however, doesn’t react at all.

_ Liar. _

It’s the eyes that tip him off in the end.  The color is wrong, the color of everything about her is wrong, but that coldness that sets in behind the color cracks apart the sheet of ice that’s sat between Sherlock and his death this whole time.

_ She stood across from him, black eyes just the wrong side of natural and black hair just as store-bought blending into the shadows growing long as they fed on the light of the dying day.  Her hand, wrapped around the grip of a silenced, charcoal gun, pointed directly at his chest. _

_ Sherlock had been so careful.  Sherlock had been so close.  Sherlock had pulled and pulled and pulled until every thread snapped and unraveled and fell away.  And yet...  _

_ “I never would have noticed you,” Sherlock said and he surprised himself with the calm lilt of his tone.  “So why are you making sure I do?” _

_ “A final farewell,” she replied with a careless shrug.  The ice cracking beneath dark lenses scratched away at the casualness, revealing jagged edges of hatred like the tops of glaciers. Sherlock shivered.  “You are going to die and you are going to know who killed you.” _

_ “And who is that?” _

_ “Sebastienne Moran.” _

_ “Ah.”  His Final Problem.  The last person keeping Sherlock from returning home and now she stood across from him, her colors wrong and her eyes cracked around hate and her hand wrapped around the grip of a silenced, charcoal gun.  It should hurt more, knowing he would die here just at the edge of completion, but he was just too tired. _

_ She pulled the trigger.  Sherlock fell.   _

_ But still he breathed and she stepped over him as he stared sightlessly up at the darkening ceiling as the last of the day’s light lost its war against the night.  She kneeled down, placed a gloved finger just above the hole perforating his chest and tapped.  “This is surgery.  You cheated the game.  I want you to live long enough to see his eyes and know you failed to protect him. I want you to know what it’s like.” _

_ Sherlock went impossibly colder, fear like nothing he had felt in years spilled into his veins to replace the blood that flooded out of them.   “No.” _

_ “Yes.”  Her head tilted to the side and she smiled. “Infection or shock, I wonder? Either way, it won't be pleasant, I imagine.”  _

_ But Sherlock barely made out the words as blood loss and fear fight to drag his brain every way but sane. _

―

“ _ You _ ,” Sherlock growls and his voice doubles back from the radio, twice as sinister.  “Sebastienne.”

Mary reacts, finally, a tiny twitch at the corner of her left eye, but it's enough.  Sherlock howls and the room explodes, papers scattering everywhere as the table they were on slams back against the far wall. 

“Sherlock, no!” Molly screams, but Sherlock barely hears her as he stalks towards Mary, emotion crackling along his skin like static shock and flame. She's too close to John.  She’s too close. She’s too―

_ she's a threat. _

And she’s looking at Sherlock like he's actually visible and that's enough to stop him and in that pause he hears John, stuttering and unsure.

“S-Sherlock?”    

Mary laughs and it's a horrifying sound, just as sharp and frozen as her eyes, just as cracked. She’s empty handed but Sherlock doesn’t think that matters to a woman like her; besides, no one here will have a gun. Sherlock wants to answer John, wants to smooth away that uncertainty but Mary is speaking and the erratic, flashing hatred from before crackles instantly back to life. “The impossible, Mr. Holmes, has nothing on you.  A spirit, a ghost―look at you!  How does it feel?  Do you like being dead and helpless?”

Sherlock snarls wordlessly and one of the florescent bulbs pops and sparks out its death, shrouding the room in deeper shadows.  Mary has a hand at her wrist, fingers tugging to adjust the sleeve of her red coat.   “Oh, that’s scary, what else can you do?”

There are three other people in the room but Sherlock can’t remember who they are as his vision narrows down to a point entirely occupied by her; so much noise buzzes through him, around him―light flashing to compensate for his absent heartbeat.

There are three other people in the room but Sherlock reaches out and his hands wrap around the throat of the only one with color, phantom fingers gripping until she chokes and he can see her skin dimpling through his nails.  She doesn’t struggle for freedom, she just grins at him through it all, hissing out words through her collapsing larynx. “I’ve k-kept him warm f-for you. Ssshould I return him?”   
  
There are three other people in the room but one steps aside and Sherlock’s grip slips and releases as John’s face, broken into sharp fragments of grief and disbelief and anger, reels Sherlock back into himself.  The buzzing, violent sounds realign as radio fuzz and shouting; The scene further unfolds on Molly who has moved enough to wrap a hand into John’s jumper to stop him from advancing further while Lestrade stands braced behind Mary, handcuffs snicking into place around her wrists.  

The yelling stops as Sherlock stumbles back, fingers passing harmlessly through Mary’s flesh as the fight drains out of him, and he thinks that maybe all the noise had been him.  

“Sherlock,” John says and his voice croaks like he’s said it a thousand times before and no one’s heard him, like no one ever will. “Christ, please look at me.”

Sherlock does, turning so that John’s expressive face is no longer a grounding force in his periphery, but the full horizon of his sight.  John hurts, Sherlock can see it in every line and tremble of his body, but he isn’t _ hurt _ . He’s alive and whole and right  _ there _ . 

“John.”

“Yeah, it’s me.”  John smiles and it wobbles and cracks at the edges but Sherlock returns it.  “And it’s you.  This isn’t smoke and mirrors, right?  No elaborate scheme to catch the bad guy?”

John reaches out to test that even as Sherlock shakes his head.  His fingers skim through Sherlock’s chest and Sherlock gasps at the warmth of it.  He thinks he hears Molly and Lestrade echo the gasp, but he’s too focused on John.  John stares at where his knuckles have sunk beneath the belstaff, tears bright and unshed as he watches something ripple out from the contact.  Sherlock can feel it, the four points of warmth coalescing and starbursting across his skin to erase the grave wax and dirt and blood that marked him as a corpse long buried. Their eyes meet when John raises his head and the wobbly smile turns rueful.  “I guess not, even you wouldn’t go that far for a bit of drama.”

“I don’t know, I once faked my own suicide to protect the one I loved.”  

John’s eyes narrow at that, catching on something in Sherlock’s voice, catching on the very specific slip.  “Were you going to come back?”

“I tried.  I tried so hard―all I wanted was to protect you and to come home.  I’m sorry, John, I―”

“I forgive you.”  

Sherlock doesn’t have time to swallow the tightness in his throat before it tears out of him as a near-wail, and he has no time to wonder at the way the tears feel just as hot at the places John touches him before John chokes on his own sob and he steps closer.  The entirety of his palm presses over where Sherlock’s heart should be, a flat, five-pointed star of heat that Sherlock never wants to live without. John’s forehead falls forward against Sherlock’s chest as he breaths out words like a confession. “I miss you so much it feels like my heart has been stolen from me and nothing will ever fill the hole.  I never got to tell you how much you meant to me, how you saved me.  I never told you, I couldn’t tell you―”

“I love you,” Sherlock whispers when John can’t continue.

John’s head jolts up, cheeks smudged with the tracks of tears still trying to fall.  “Christ, yeah, I love you, too.”   

And something snaps inside of Sherlock, like bonds breaking. This time he can’t mistake the sound of Molly’s gasp as background noise and he turns his head towards her.  Her eyes are just as wet as theirs, gleaming in the too harsh, too dull glare of the fluorescent lighting―but her smile, while sad, is also so relieved it pangs.  “Your resolution.”

“You’re glowing,” Lestrade says from behind him, and while it’s a disbelieving statement of fact, it clarifies Molly’s. 

“Oh,” Sherlock breathes out as he catches the lambent edges of his outline, sees them start to fade away as something akin to peace spreads out from his chest.

“You’re going,” John says so quietly Sherlock almost doesn’t hear it, but the grief and pain in his voice hurts.  Sherlock smiles at him, just as sad, but he can’t bury the hope either.  That niggling that something has to exist beyond the grave, that they will have a second chance at this, that they will meet again and they will get it right.

“I am,” Sherlock replies and he doesn’t have much time left for goodbyes but he breaks himself away from John long enough to give them.  “Thank you both for your help, even if I had to do your job for you, Greg.  I’m trusting you with her.”  _  And with John _ , goes unsaid but heard.

“Arse,” Lestrade grumbles, but it’s distinctly thick.  “We’ll miss you.”

“Maybe we’ll see you again someday,” Molly says and Sherlock thinks it’s her way of reminding him that the little shard of hope he harbors might actually be more than that.  “Take care.”

Sherlock turns back to John and bends down low so that he can whisper in his ear.  “It’s goodbye for now, John Watson, but I’ll be waiting for you.”

Sherlock’s body has nearly faded away completely when John responds, firm and certain, “And I’ll find you, Sherlock Holmes.”

―

Somewhere a heart beats into life, strong and full of promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not crying you're crying.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this and thank you for reading it! If you want to harass me, I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/CatieBrieFic) and [tumblr](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/), so come bother me there if BBC Sherlock/Harry Potter is your thing OR come bother me [here](https://atavismofthelemonlover.tumblr.com/) if any of the following acronyms mean anything to you: YYH, FMA or YOI...although I will probably combine the two blogs in the near future since I seem to be shifting fandom focus.


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